School #2, Fall 2014

Instructor, Niomi Cherney: niomi.cherney@mail.utoronto.ca

Course Syllabus
We are a knot of relations: embodiment and ethics.

Hello!

Im so glad youre coming to School! I really look forward to reading some interesting
things with you all, and sharing some great discussions. In what follows, I am going to
give a brief introduction to the course, give an overview of how I see the theme of the
course progressing and say a few things about how I would like our sessions to run. I
would invite your questions and feedback on anything contained in this syllabus.

Course Description:

The phenomenological world is not pure being, but rather the sense that shines forth at
the intersection of my experiences with those of others through a sort of gearing into
each other. The phenomenological world is thus inseparable from subjectivity and
intersubjectivity, which establish their unity through the taking up [la reprise] of my past
experiences into my present experiences, or of the other persons experience into my
own.
~ Merleau-Ponty, Preface, The Phenomenology of Perception (2012: xxxiv).

i. A cursory introduction to phenomenology

In this course, we will mostly concentrate on philosophical method of inquiry called
phenomenology. There are many different ways of doing phenomenology, and much
debate within the field about the right way that it should be done. There are also plenty
of thinkers (including some well known post-structuralist philosophers such as Deleuze
and Derrida) who developed substantive critiques of phenomenology and of specific
phenomenological philosophers. For the purposes of this work together, we will try to
suspend these critiques in an effort to learn about the practice of phenomenology, and
the kind of understanding this way of viewing the world can generate. It is not our effort
to defend phenomenology against critique, nor is it the work of this course to necessarily
try to situate its relevance within a canon of thought and history. Phenomenology is the
study of the structures of human experience. It is a radically unfinished, perpetually
unresolved way of describing the world. Our goal here is to engage in this perpetually
unresolved way of describing experience and in so doing, to open up the
possibility of letting experience show itself.

What does it meant to let experience show itself, and why is that important? Until about
the time of German Idealism, when philosophers like Fichte, Schelling, Kant and Hegel
started to write (and arguably right up until Husserl if you ask some people), Western
philosophy had really been divided into two camps: empiricism and rationalism. Loosely
defined, empiricism lays claim to the external world and sense experience as the
genesis of all knowledge, while rationalism posits a consciousness that can possess
knowledge prior to or independent of sense experience. Phenomenologys very basic
project is to negotiate a middle ground between these two extremes. One of the
philosophers we will be studying in this course, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, sets up his
contribution to this project by situating consciousness in the body, and in this way
undoing what he sees as a false divide between inner and outer experience (which is
the crux of the empiricism vs rationalism debate). On Merleau-Pontys account,
experience never rests precisely in the hidden interiority of our consciousness. Rather
School #2, Fall 2014
Instructor, Niomi Cherney: niomi.cherney@mail.utoronto.ca
because consciousness is found only in and through descriptions of our embodied
experience, we only find ourselves already immersed in the world. It is therefore only
possible to develop an understanding of being a person by accounting for the way that
we are already intertwined with the world, including both objects and people. Merleau-
Ponty calls for an account of experience that does justice to the ways that our embodied
lives impossibly toss us forward into the world, while demanding that the world likewise
find its counterpart in us.

ii. Course content

As we move through the material in the course, we will describe in more detail how
Merleau-Ponty practices his method of doing phenomenology and how it has been taken
up in the work of some contemporary phenomenologists. Our work together will be
broken down into two major chunks. In the first half of the course, we will read two book
chapters from works by contemporary phenomenologists. In sections from Eva Simms
The Child in the World: Embodiment, Time and Language in Early Childhood we will
begin to explore the structure of intersubjectivity as the extension of dissolving the divide
between empiricist and rationalist perspectives. Building on the themes of lived space
and time as structures that are shared between our own bodies and the bodies of others,
we will read a section of Lisa Guenthers book, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and
Its Afterlives. Through the case study of solitary confinement, Guenther uses a
framework from one of Merleau-Pontys predecessors, Edmund Husserl, to illustrate the
necessity of intersubjective experience for the creative expression of our own possibility
and action. In the final two weeks of the course, we will read selections from both
Merleau-Pontys Phenomenology of Perception and Simone de Beauvoirs Ethics of
Ambiguity. We will reconstitute a notion of human freedom that is not derived from the
force of free acting, rational and autonomous agents. Instead, our own possibilities are
intimately tied up in the worlds of other people, and the resonance of their bodily action
in us.

Structure of the course

i. Readings

Each week there will be approximately 20-30 pages of assigned reading. Some of it is
very dense, some of it is less dense. I will prepare discussion questions in advance of
each meeting, which will help to guide your reading. It is really nice to come to sessions
having read the material and already primed with questions. We will be able to have
much better conversations that way. Though I will give a brief introductory overview (20-
30 mins each class), it is not my intention to lecture during School. Instead, Im there to
facilitate discussion and to field questions. This is difficult shit. I dont have any
answers, Ive just been studying this stuff for a while and I really like thinking about it. I
am excited about the idea of thinking and talking about it with a new group of people. I
hope you will be too.



ii. Glossary of terms

Together, we will co-author a glossary of key terms from each week. It will be an open
access Google document and we will all contribute. You can post a word and someone
School #2, Fall 2014
Instructor, Niomi Cherney: niomi.cherney@mail.utoronto.ca
else can post a definition. Or you could put both. At the end of each class, well check in
about terms that should go in the glossary.


iii. Discussion guidelines/ rules for School

It is very nice to have a discussion with a group of people who are all on the same page.
Please do not say anything marginalizing at all. Ever. Be cool. Think about the
words and body language you are using, and how they could be read as either inclusive
or exclusive. Only say things and behave in ways that are inclusive. To that end, we will
try to only refer to things we have read together in this course. If you want to bring
in an idea from another thinker, please do so with the explicit purpose of clarifying
something you are trying to express about the current reading. Do not assume that
anyone/ everyone has read the thing you are talking about. I have been in school for one
hundred million years and there is tons of stuff I havent read, so even if its just for the
sake of making sure I understand what youre talking about, dont assume any outside
knowledge.

These things are extremely important, and the only things that are against the rules in
the School classroom. Anything else goes.

Reading Schedule

Week 1: October 5
th
@ Videofag, 4pm
Introduction to phenomenology via infant development
Simms, Eva. Milk and Flesh: Infancy and Coexistence in The Child in the World:
Embodiment Time and Language in Early Childhood. Detroit: Wayne State University
Press (2008): 11-25.
Additional optional reading:
(ibid) The Worlds Skin Ever Expanding: Spatiality and the Structures of Child
Consciousness: 27-55

Week 2: October 12
th
@ Videofag, 4pm.
Phenomenology continued: lived space and time
Guenther, Lisa. Person, World and Other: A Husserlian Critique of Solitary
Confinement in Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press (2013): 23-38.

Weeks 3 & 4, October 19
th
& October 26
th
, both at Double Double Land.
** Whole text available in PDF, will send specific sections closer to the dates. If you want
to get started, you could read the preface to the Phenomenology which I wont assign,
but is extremely helpful.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The Phenomenology of Perception (Don Landes translation)
Simone de Beauvoir: Ethics of Ambiguity